Re: [*EXTERNAL*] File keyed on a date field: the read doesn't actually get anything! What am I doing wrong?

Do you have DATFMT(*ISO) specified?
"When initializing Date or Time data type fields or named constants with
Date or Time values, the format of the literal must be consistent with the
default format as derived from the Control specification, regardless of the
actual format of the date or time field.

Date literals take the form D'xx-xx-xx' where:
D indicates that the literal is of type date
xx-xx-xx is a valid date in the format specified on the control
specification (separator included)
xx-xx-xx is enclosed by apostrophes

Charles

On Wed, Jan 7, 2026 at 1:35 PM James H. H. Lampert via RPG400-L <
rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 1/7/26 12:29 PM, Rick Rauterkus wrote:

Are you putting a value into JAN31? If not, you are just positioning to
the beginning of the file and reading the previous record which won't

find

anything.

Yes. It's got a value (my apologies for not saying so earlier). The
INZ(D'2017-01-31') clause on the declaration would have wrapped in the
email.

And it has three friends, all of them INZ'd to different dates.

This excerpt is from a test program, after the real program exhibited
the symptom; it uses a date value constructed from month, day, and year
values read from a file.

--
JHHL

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